Browse NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive by date and media: Archive Discoveries
Browse the NASA APOD archive without needing the exact date first. Filter by media type and keep moving deeper into older images and videos.
Comet McNaught-Hartley
Outbound and climbing above the plane of our solar system, comet McNaught-Hartley (C/1999 T1) is presently soaring through northern skies. This telescopic picture , a composite of…
A Sun Pillar
Have you ever seen a sun pillar ? When the air is cold and the Sun is rising or setting , falling ice crystals can reflect sunlight and create an unusual column of light. Ice…
M82 After the Crash
When did the Cigar Galaxy light up? Evidence indicates how M82, the Cigar Galaxy , became so bright and peculiar: it collided with neighboring galaxy M81 . Astronomers become…
NGC 1818: A Young Globular Cluster
Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way . Back in the old days , back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy . Today, there are…
Apollo / Surveyor Stereo View
Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze into this dramatic stereo view from the surface of the Moon ! Inspired by last Saturday's APOD , experimentor Patrick Vantuyne offers this…
X-Rays From HCG 62
Scanning the skies for galaxies Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies , now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups…
Bright Venus
Have you seen a bright evening star in the western sky lately? That's no star, that's planet Venus the second “rock” from the Sun . Blazing at -4.6 magnitude , Venus, after the…
Saturn At Night
From a spectacular vantage point over 1.4 billion kilometers from the sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back toward the inner solar system to record this startling view of…
M27: The Dumbbell Nebula
The first hint of what will become of our Sun was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of “annoying” diffuse objects not to be…
Survivor: NEAR Shoemaker On Asteroid Eros
Not part of a television game series, the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft survived its unprecedented landing on an asteroid last month. As suggested in the illustration inset above ,…
TT Cygni: Carbon Star
TT Cygni is a cool red giant star with a wind. This false-color picture of TT Cyg was made using a coordinated array of millimeter wavelength radio telescopes and shows radio…
Apollo 12 Visits Surveyor 3
Apollo 12 was the second mission to land humans on the Moon . The landing site was picked to be near the location of Surveyor 3, a robot spacecraft that had landed on the Moon…
LkHa101: The Hole in the Doughnut
You'd need a really big cup of coffee with this doughnut ... because the hole in the middle is about a billion kilometers across. Centered on the Sun, a circle that size would lie…
Maximum Sun
Astronomers recently witnessed an astounding, large scale solar event as the Sun's north and south magnetic poles changed places! But, this complete solar magnetic field flip was…
A Space Station Meets its Destiny
The International Space Station (ISS) had a date with Destiny earlier this month. More specifically, the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis installed the science laboratory named…
The Witch Head Nebula
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble -- maybe Macbeth should have consulted the Witch Head Nebula. This suggestively shaped reflection nebula is…
Sand Dunes on Mars
Sand dunes on Mars can appear exotic. The dark dunes above might be compared to shark's teeth or chocolate confections . In reality, they arise from the complex relationship…
The Sudbury Neutrino Detector
Two thousand meters below the ground, a giant sphere has begun to detect nearly invisible particles. These particles, neutrinos , are extremely abundant in the universe but…
Infrared Horsehead
This famous cosmic dust cloud was imaged in infrared light by the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) satellite. The false-color picture shows the bright…
M55: Color Magnitude Diagram
This color “picture” of globular star cluster M55 may not look like any star cluster you've ever seen. Still, it shows a most fundamental view for students of stellar astronomy.…
3C294: Distant X-Ray Galaxy Cluster
Large clusters of galaxies are the most massive objects in the universe. Astronomers now realize that a hallmark of these cosmic behemoths are gas clouds with temperatures of tens…
A Sonic Boom
Many people have heard a sonic boom, but few have seen one. When an airplane travels at a speed faster than sound, density waves of sound emitted by the plane cannot precede the…
Star Forming Region S106
Massive star IRS4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 106…
Shuttle Plume Shadow Points to Moon
Why would the shadow of a space shuttle launch plume point toward the Moon? Two weeks ago during the launch of Atlantis , the Sun , Earth , Moon , and rocket were all properly…
Viewing discoveries from 14 March 2001 through 19 February 2001.